Rough-and-Tumble

Elizabeth Streb’s daredevil dances.

Streb has described herself as “addicted to physicality,” and her works are famous for an element of danger. One of her dancers says that, to work with her, “you’d better be able to look fear in the face and not run.”

Photograph by Ioulex

The radical choreographer Elizabeth Streb has grown weary of meeting people who tell her, “Oh, you’re the one who ransacks the body and runs into walls.” Streb calls her company the STREB Extreme Action Company, after her method. She calls its headquarters, in Brooklyn, the STREB Lab for Action Mechanics, and she calls her dancers action heroes. She admires various classical and modern dancers and choreographers and works, but her own dancers enact a brash and pitiless system of movement that disdains and subverts politer forms. Of herself and her company, she says, “I am a criminal, and we are a blunt instrument charging forward.”

In a Streb dance called “Gauntlet,” commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center, two cinder blocks on ropes swing like pendulums. The dancers congregate where there aren’t any blocks, then leave as they arrive. The escapes are narrow. In “Slice,” the hazard is an I-beam on a chain. The first time I saw “Slice,” in rehearsal, a friend of Streb’s was visiting, and as the I-beam was being hung she said, “You’re in for a treat,” then she shuddered and said, “I can’t watch this.” Other Streb titles are “Crash,” “Impact,” and “Human Fountain.” Each requires the dancers to move rapidly, even desperately. A union stagehand once told Streb, “The last time I saw people move like that, someone yelled, ‘Grenade!’ ”

Streb’s dances exemplify her long inquiry into the substance of movement. Certain actions, she believes, are so powerful that they register kinesthetically—in the viewer’s own body, that is. Most people, however, are action-blind. The person or the thing performing the gesture distracts from the gesture itself. She wonders why, when people see a horse running, for example, they say, “There’s a horse galloping,” not, “There’s a gallop.” At the heart of Streb’s inquiry is the ambition to enact flight, to overcome what she calls “the hegemony of the ground.” Ballet dancers and modern dancers fly by leaping, which she discounts as too simplistic to pass for flight. Her dancers simulate flying by stepping from heights and spreading their arms; a critic once wrote that they looked like hawks. Flight figures in many Streb dances, but “Human Fountain” is her signature flight dance. It is also her longest, her most lavish, and the one she says is her “most lyrical.” It is performed on a broad set of scaffolds, and most recently with twenty-one dancers. The scaffolding is forty feet tall, with platforms at ten, twenty, and thirty feet. At the beginning, a dancer launches from each platform. They land on mats, climb back up the scaffolding, and fall again, as others replace them. For more than ten minutes, the dancers fall singly and in pairs and, when a dancer calls “royal flush,” in quartets. They fall backward and from handstands. They twist in the air, they flip, they mime running, they jackknife, they thrust their chests and strike poses like hood ornaments. At the climax, all twenty-one dancers are in the air. It is like watching swallows dipping over rooftops, at that moment when, wings folded and falling, they are merely forms.

Falling, Streb believes, is an essentialist act, like fire. No embellishment or refinement can make them more like what they are. Years ago, Streb taught herself to fall backward from a standing position. It took weeks to overcome her reluctance. When she was able to fall onto hard floors, especially stone floors, people were impressed. Her dancers learn first to fall close to the ground. One way to experience the force of falling is to prepare to do a pushup, then abruptly withdraw one’s arms, Streb says. A more advanced introductory fall is the table fall, in which, from a standing position, a dancer lifts his or her feet into the air, tilts to become horizontal, and lands on his or her chest. “Falling never gets less scary,” one of the dancers told me. “It’s always this visceral reaction—my palms sweat, my heart leaps.” A dancer who went through a difficult period with falling described “Human Fountain” as “a pure sinistering nightmare.” Streb is sixty-five, and has been retired from dancing since 1998, but there is nothing she asks her dancers to do that she hasn’t done herself, or wouldn’t do. “I put in my thirty years,” she said recently. “I don’t want to say I have a completely broken body, because I’m still walking and talking, but I am the person who has won twenty wars, and I am now sending you out there, and, live or die, it’s time to fly. I am rough like that, and I don’t apologize.”

Streb has won a MacArthur award and has been a Guggenheim Fellow. Her dances have been performed at the Spoleto Festival, in Charleston, South Carolina; in London, at the Barbican; in Paris, at the Théâtre de la Vie; at the Kennedy Center; and, in New York, at the Joyce Theatre, in Grand Central Terminal, in Central Park, and on the boardwalk at Coney Island. The company will perform in New York in December, at the STREB Lab*,* and next year at the Barclays Center. A Streb dance typically starts as a drawing made with colored markers in a notebook. Streb also keeps a list of “absurdist inquiries,” such as falling up. In addition, she has a list of fantasy dances. Some are impractical, and some are “past prime”—that is, she is too old to perform them, and they are too dangerous to ask anyone else to do.

Fire fascinates Streb. When she was nine, she accidentally burned down a barn belonging to her uncle while playing with matches. Streb performed a fire dance at the fortieth birthday of her partner, the journalist Laura Flanders, which was held in a warehouse in Brooklyn. “It was about nine or ten at night, December 5, 2001,” Streb said. “I had been trying to think what would be a very special solo I could perform for her—I could put out a fire with my very own body.” She built a lane about sixteen feet long from two pieces of plywood, like a gangplank. “I had Laura stand at the far end, so I was walking toward her. Halfway down the lane was a pool of Sterno. You don’t really light a fire indoors, but I did. I’m fifty-one. I had carefully measured the size of the fire to be the width of my torso. The lights are dimmed, the music starts, and I begin to walk. Laura sees the fire, and the look on her face is: What are you doing?”

Flanders: “I had no idea what was going on. She has deeply profound curiosities and passions, and the two things were mixed up together—her passion about me and her passion about fire. As soon as I saw her crouch down, I knew she was going to leap into it.”

“I flew into the air,” Streb said. “I wanted to be high enough that people would see my body above the fire, spread-eagle, and the fire underneath. So I’m in the air, and then, choom, I land on the fire. I think the size of the rectangle was incorrect, or I missed. Hard to know. I stood up and looked down, and I went, ‘I am on fire.’ My clothes were on fire. It was the fastest-moving thing I had ever seen, and it was coming up my body, and for a half second I was thinking about the rate of the fire. I had heard stories about firemen getting enraptured by the occurrence of the fire and being stunned momentarily into inaction. I thought, Whoa, if it gets to my hair I’m going to be screwed, and I’m also going to ruin my girlfriend’s party.”

For a moment, no one came to help her. “They all thought that I was supposed to do that,” she said. “Then one of my dancers held the cuffs of my pants, and I wriggled out of them, and I ran out of the room. When I came back to the party, the heterosexuals all said, ‘My boyfriend never did that for me.’ The next day, I was walking down the street, thinking of the people I passed, What did you do yesterday? I was on fire. I’m such a jock.”

Streb has spiky black hair, a symmetrical face, and a strong, square jaw and chin. She wears glasses with heavy black frames, and she tends to look at people askance, as if she expected to be challenged. She appears to listen to every word that someone says to her. She dresses handsomely but almost always in the same outfit—dark shirts and dark suits, with broad shoulders and sleeves that cover nearly half of her hands. She tucks her trousers into tall boots that look like motorcycle boots. She walks slightly favoring one knee; she needs to get the other replaced. Since childhood, she has liked to improvise dramatic scenes. The poet and artist Danita Geltner, with whom Streb was once involved, told me that their courtship began one night when she saw Streb at the end of a bar lighting matches and blowing them out while staring at her.

Streb was born in 1950, in Rochester, New York. When she was two, she was adopted by Leonard and Carolyn Streb. On the adoption papers, her name is Elizabeth Green. She isn’t sure of the circumstances of her adoption, but she had a broken arm, and she thinks that she was removed from her birth parents’ house by a court order. Leonard Streb was a mason and a carpenter, and he built the house they lived in.

“My parents didn’t have anything cultured in the household,” Streb said one day, as we were leaving a restaurant downtown. (Streb and Flanders live in SoHo.) “Not music or anything. My father played cards and hunted, and I went with him. He would stay out all day. I definitely was interested in that kind of physicality. He taught me how to shoot a .22 rifle, but when he and his friends were skeet shooting I saw that the shotgun was bigger, so I wanted to shoot that, too. He gave me the gun, and I pulled the trigger and fell down, and all the friends hit the dirt. He thought it was funny, but he also probably thought, You learn from experience, and I was silently absorbing this and thinking, Now I know how to shoot a shotgun.”

Streb went to a Catholic high school for girls. At fifteen, with money from working nights as a counter girl at a Woolworth’s, she bought a motorcycle. During the next seven years, she bought and sold five more bikes, each larger than the one before. “When I graduated to a Honda 350, the biggest one I ever owned, I experimented with exactly how fast I needed to go for the wheels to lift off the ground,” she said. “The answer turned out to be ninety miles per hour.”

On weekends in the winter, Streb learned to ski. She liked to go straight downhill. She went to college at SUNY Brockport, where she was surprised to be told in her dance classes to study her form in a mirror rather than note the way that her body felt, and to count time to music rather than move freely. In “How to Become an Extreme Action Hero,” published in 2010, she wrote, “I was addicted to physicality. I wanted to feel my body pushing, falling, climbing, catching, watching, and crashing with everything and anything that moved. I was already an ecstatic dancer in the world. After accumulating certain memories of motion from these early experiences”—meaning skiing and shotguns and motorcycles—“I kept wondering, when would I sense the intensity I was used to in regard to momentum, velocity, impact, rebound, and weight? I kept wanting to actually move.”

After graduating in 1972, Streb rode her Honda to San Francisco, paying for the trip with a hundred and twenty dollars she had saved from pumping gas and training as a mechanic. In 1974, she moved to New York. With a friend, she rented an unfinished loft on Canal Street. The first night, rats kept her awake. She was told that it was pointless to try to trap the rats, because they were too smart, so she got a pellet gun and shot at them as they ran along the baseboards. Her father helped her finish the loft, which allowed her to rent out space by the hour to dancers for classes and rehearsals.

The choreographer Bill T. Jones told me that Streb was “a wonderful dancer. Very athletic, very sexy, with the charisma of a movie star.” Sometime in the late nineteen-seventies or early eighties, the stage lights failed as she was holding a fourth-position lunge—one leg forward and one arm held before her. “As I stood there for an inordinate amount of time,” she said, “I heard some question pierce my brain: What does this movement mean? It became a question that plagued me. If you can’t answer that question, I thought, you are lying to the audience. No more step, step, step, leap. No more arabesques, no more promenades. If I didn’t know what I was doing, or why, I shouldn’t do it. In movement terms, it would be tantamount to lying.”

In a dance called “Fall Line,” presented at Dance Theatre Workshop in 1981, Streb “put up a slanted board, a ramp,” the critic Deborah Jowitt, who reviewed “Fall Line” for the Village Voice, told me. “The whole dance was her and a male partner struggling to the top and sliding down.” Streb had painted lines on the ramp and varnished it to make it slippery, and she and her partner used the lines as paths. “Fall Line” ended when every path had been used. The critic for the Times, Jack Anderson, dismissed the piece as “nothing but one stunt after another.” Many of the movements were “genuinely difficult,” he wrote. “But what is difficult is not necessarily also automatically interesting.”

People began to pay more attention to Streb in 1984, after John Cage wrote that when he first saw Streb perform he “was exhilarated. Her energy, inventiveness, uninterrupted attention are all great. Every time I hear that she is dancing, I arrange to see her work.”

Of Streb’s early days, Jowitt said, “You didn’t look at her and think, This isn’t dance. But she was so unlike anyone else. There was this factor of amazement—how did she do that, what if she missed? But you were laughing, too, because some of the propositions were so wild. Who would think of doing a thing like that? Not even, Who would think of that and call it a dance?”

Streb’s dances don’t tell stories; they aren’t made to be beautiful or to illustrate an emotion, an event, or a conceit. They mean what they appear to mean, and they aren’t set to music. “Music is the enemy of dance,” Streb says. As she sees it, music bullies a dance into conforming to its rhythm. Rhythm in a Streb dance is flexible and spontaneous, determined by the dancers’ capacities and the actions unfolding. Classical and modern dance take place on the floor, with the dancers vertical. A lot of Streb’s dances take place in the air, with the dancers horizontal. Transferring weight from one foot to the other while vertical means “that the skeleton is dragging the muscles,” Streb says. In her method, “the muscles drag the skeleton.” For their safety, her dancers must closely follow the routes they are assigned, and they cannot improvise. Classical and modern dancers generalize about space, Streb says. If they deviate left or right a few feet, it’s not likely to matter.

Streb derived her practices partly from studying Eadweard Muybridge’s serial photographs of human and animal movements—men and horses running and jumping and so on. To her, each sequence was constructed of preparation, recovery, and subject—that is, of the act itself. She aspired to eliminate the start and the finish, and managed this partly by introducing machines, which get the dancers into the air, often turbulently, and allow them to travel much faster than they could on their own. She calls the machines her company’s spaceships, allowing her dancers to reach “unknown, untraversed topographies.”

Perhaps a quarter of Streb’s dances include machines. She designs them with the help of an engineer, and has them built. She has a machine that she calls Gizmo, which has a pronged counterweight and a wheel large enough for a dancer to stand in. It looks like a circle wearing a dunce hat, and it revolves on a frame. When someone stands in the wheel and walks, the wheel turns. The faster the feet move, the faster the wheel turns. The ground feels as if it were falling away. “It’s not like walking on the street prepares you for walking in Gizmo,” one of the dancers told me.

Streb also owns a revolving floor, the only STREB machine that has a motor. In the center is a disk that turns while a larger frame turns around it. The disks can be made to turn at different speeds or in opposite directions. While the floor turns, the dancers run as fast as they can and appear to be going nowhere, or revolve and hold a pose, as in a frame of Muybridge. They lean over so far that an invisible object seems to be holding them up. The newest piece of hardware is a turning ladder supported by a scaffold which is used in a dance called “Ascension.” Streb’s plan had been to have dancers climb the ladder as it revolved, even when they were upside down, but so far no one has been able to climb while facing the ground. The centrifugal force makes the dancers feel that they might be thrown. Streb says the dancers are close to managing the movement. What is necessary is the same thing needed in many STREB circumstances. “You have to develop a technique to confront your sense of peril,” she said.

STREB is based on pursuing what Streb calls a real move. Velocity matters—someone moving who could choose, instead, to be still is probably not performing a real move. A real move, such as a fall, is one that a person would get hurt trying to stop. Streb’s dancers are as devoted to finding and enacting real moves as Streb is, but she worries constantly about them. “I have never not been terrified before a performance,” she said. She becomes closer to the mothers of her dancers than to the fathers, she says, because the mothers tend to care more about their children’s safety.

Auditions for STREB, which are held irregularly, take place at the Lab, in the course of three days, and are rigorous. Streb seeks the dancer “who is most shocking in the way he or she moves.” She doesn’t like it when people look at her to judge her reaction. She eliminates people who hesitate, hotshots, people who seem not to take direction, and people who won’t stop talking. Streb insists that a new dancer stay for three years, because it seems to take two years to reach the level of accomplishment that the others have attained and to gain their trust. Streb also prefers that her dancers be older. “It’s not a young person’s form,” she said. “It’s a mature form, because of the responsibility.”

There are ten dancers in STREB, five men and five women, from roughly disparate backgrounds. They share the feeling that performing Streb’s work is thrilling. The men are Daniel Rysak (whose training is in dance and theatre), Felix Hess (dance and theatre; he and Rysak were in the touring company of “Cats” together), Leonardo Giron (ballet, gymnastics), Jamarious Stewart (dance), and Fabio Tavares (circus, dance, and theatre). The women are Cassandre Joseph (gymnastics, some circus), Samantha Jakus (dance), Sarah Callan (gymnastics, trapeze), Jackie Carlson (ballet), and Justina Grayman (dance and gymnastics). Each new dancer quickly grows muscle-bound. During his first few months at STREB, Jamarious Stewart told me, “I felt my body changing dramatically.” Daniel Rysak said, “Being a formal dancer, standing on the soles of your feet, you’re really bottom-strong. In STREB, you have to rely on the strength of your arms and your grip.” Unlike in ballet and modern dance, the women are effectively as strong as the men, and they do not occupy gender roles. A woman in STREB is just as likely to catch a man thrown into the air as a man is to catch a woman.

Cassandre Joseph told me that dancing in STREB “means that you’d better be able to look fear in the face and not run.” Not all dancers are afraid of the same things. Some fear certain machines, some fear falling from heights, some fear not being able to do a necessary movement or making a mistake that might injure them or someone else. Samantha Jakus told me that a few years ago she felt overtaken by fear, and to shed it she enrolled in a school for professional wrestlers. She also became “an avid reader of fear-and-anxiety books.” Sarah Callan, however, told me, “I think the fear is why I like it. It’s hard to explain. Especially to my parents.”

Often, when a dancer undertakes a challenging move, Streb flinches. I found myself averting my eyes most frequently from the landings. STREB dancers land precisely horizontal, so that no part of the body takes more force than another. “If you tilt before you land, you’re going to get walloped,” Streb said. A conventional dancer would memorize his or her form in a mirror. You can’t look in a mirror when you’re falling. I asked Cassandre Joseph how she knows she is horizontal. “Spatial awareness and muscle memory,” she said. “Your body knows: I’ve been here before.”

Releasing properly from the platform helps a dancer become horizontal. “If you go late or early, you compromise the fall,” Fabio Tavares said. “It’s not a jump, it’s a small push with your toes.” Watching weeks of rehearsals for the Barclays Center show, I saw a dancer fall improperly only once. This was Justina Grayman, the newest member, who joined last September. She fell from twenty feet. The dancers somehow land quietly, but her landing made enough noise that everyone stopped and looked at her as she lay on the mat turning her head slowly from side to side. Her jaw hurt, she said later.

When I asked Tavares what had gone wrong, he said, “She looked for the floor.” Grayman said, “You think, Oh, I’m falling, put your hands out. That’s what you know is true, but it doesn’t help in this situation.”

“It’s almost as if you have to abandon the idea of falling to fall correctly,” Tavares told me. As Grayman rose to try again, he told her, “Fall slower.”

The greatest height a STREB dancer has fallen from is forty feet. This was a fall done informally by Felix Hess, in Central Park, before a performance of “Human Fountain,” in the summer of 2013. The top of the scaffolding is forty feet. “We always joked about Level 4,” Hess told me. “It was just a curiosity. The ceiling in the studio gets in the way—Level 4 would be on the roof—but that day we had the whole sky above us, and I climbed up and sat there for a long time. I was just feeling very strong, and it felt like one of those moments to do something very special.”

Hess stood atop the scaffolding, with the company watching him below. “The more I looked at it, the more I thought I could do it,” he said. At the top of the fall, his arms twirled once compactly, as if to steady himself. He kept his eyes open as he fell, he said, so that he could “watch the ride.” He hit the ground and stood so quickly that he seemed to bounce. The dancers cheered wildly.

The next day, Hess wrote to Streb, in an e-mail, “Most noteworthy was the feeling in my face from the impact. My hit was flush. But internally my eyes and brain are still aware of the feeling twenty-four hours later.” When, after a rehearsal, I asked what he meant, he said, “My eyeballs felt like they got pressed against my skull, and I could feel my organs, because everything had slammed against my skeleton.”

Streb likened the impact to being in a car crash. Hess wrote that he thought the fall could “only be added with extreme caution.”

Critics who aren’t sympathetic to Streb’s methods or don’t understand them usually conclude that her dances are made of feats and tricks. Some simply don’t like them. “Too spectacle for me—also too earnest, too immodest,” the choreographer Susan Rethorst wrote me. Some of Streb’s peers take her more seriously, though. “Elizabeth’s work is fearless and complex,” Mikhail Baryshnikov wrote in an e-mail. “When I first saw it, I was puzzled about how it made me feel—what was it about? It’s an interesting question that I can’t ever answer completely—and perhaps it’s many answers all at once: Is it art to provoke? (Certainly.) Is it art to please? (Definitely not.) Is it art for survival? (Good question!)”

Bill T. Jones told me that he had complicated feelings about her approach, “because a hallmark of many of us who come from that generation after Martha Graham or Merce Cunningham, even after Trisha Brown, was finding another way to move. Attacking assumptions was what mattered,” not abandoning them. “I’m still attached to expressionism in dance, to psychology in dance, and to beauty.” The redeeming thing about Streb, he said, “is that she has great generosity of spirit, so you don’t feel like her pursuit of form is a critique of your own.”

I asked whether he thought her work was dance. “There have been times when I’ve wondered, Wouldn’t this be better if it were circus?” he said. “If you see what Chinese acrobats are able to do, or gymnasts, the extreme virtuosity and accomplishment, there’s a thousand years of how to balance and flip.” Streb’s work “has the thrills of circus, but you get the feeling you’re encountering an intellect using a whole series of interlocking questions,” he went on. “And that’s when it gets serious and interesting, and moves into that realm that I have to call art.”

One day, I had breakfast with Streb. “I’m probably not doing dance,” she said. “That’s probably not what I’m doing. I think that’s why people have a problem with it. It contradicts their understanding of dance. People ask how I would like my work described. The usual reply is ‘That’s not my job.’ The difficulty is having to find a place for myself, and the closest one I can find is dance, so we’re trapped with each other. But I think my form offends people. What I do is perceived as transgressive to the body, maybe harmful. It’s a split-second technique based on getting your whole body to move as a unit to levitate off the ground or land flat. Modern dancers could only move this fast with their feet. It’s a different timing, a different use of the body.”

A waiter brought us coffee. “So what is this animal, this action animal?” Streb said. “It’s maybe not modern dance, it’s not sports, it’s not circus. It’s easier to say what it is not. Why not circus? I am attached to building paragraphs of action. Circus does prepositions, meaning their sentences are short, and they stop a lot. Their grammar and syntax are less complex, and they ask for less time from the viewer’s eye. They keep stopping and getting applause. The circus has the capacity to amaze but not to move.”

Looking into her coffee, she said, “I’m engaged in an impractical idea, I know that. It may not be noticed for a hundred years. It may never be noticed. Flying is a foolish quest, and I’ve trained myself not to be defensive about what people might say.”

After breakfast, we drove in Streb’s old Honda jeep to the Lab in Williamsburg for a rehearsal. A piece in rehearsal begins with a “talk walk,” in which each dancer narrates his or her part in the sequence in which it is performed. Working on a dance for the Barclays Center, one of the dancers said, “Run run run, run run fly.” Another said, “Helicopter go.” “Swipe out,” said a third. When the piece ended, they gathered before Streb, who gave them remarks she had written on a yellow legal pad. They moved all together, as if in a flock. They only briefly took their eyes from her. “I want you to be like one million stones falling from the sky, but they don’t catch up with each other,” she said. And: “Don’t give out to the audience that there are invisible forces against you.” And: “Chaos is what we want. How do we legislate that?”

A maxim that Streb uses with the dancers is “Harder, faster, sooner, higher.” There is no STREB manual; a new dancer learns to fall and to perform the tasks that he or she is given by watching, but there are a couple of precepts that recur. The STREB Law of Timing says that you do a move in as much time as it takes your body to do that move (no more, no less) given the skill that you have. A corollary is that you can do whatever you want whenever you can, meaning that if a dancer wants to look at the audience and grin while flying, he or she can. The can is a form of imperative, since if the dancer can’t, he or she probably gets hurt.

Last February, Jamarious Stewart fell off the ladder during “Ascension,” at the Hammerstein Ballroom, in Manhattan. He fell about fifteen feet, twisting in the air like a corkscrew. He scampered up so fast that no one in the audience seemed to register that the fall wasn’t part of the dance.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said afterward. He was lying on a couch in the dressing room, with an ice pack on his back. The other members of the company had gathered around him. It was a small room, and it felt like being in a den or a cave. “I remember climbing, then my foot slipped, I think, and it caused my hands to slip, and then I was free-falling. It was like everything went white, and when I came back to reality I was standing on top of the ladder again.” He had a compression fracture in one of his vertebrae, which led to his observing rehearsals for a few days.

The most serious injury in STREB’s history happened to a dancer named DeeAnn Nelson, in 2007. During a piece called “Two Moving Planks,” she tripped and fell about six feet into a plow position, on her back with her legs above her head. “It was not a position we trained to fall into,” she said. “I knew something really bad had happened.” She made it backstage but collapsed, and her body “started to seize, like it was beginning to cramp, and I remember feeling like my diaphragm might stop working, and then I couldn’t get up.” Nelson had a compression fracture that required spinal surgery and pins to correct. She had a child recently, and took part in an Ironman competition, but she has never returned to dancing.

At the rehearsal, Streb sat at a folding table with several notebooks spread before her. “I’m always thinking, What’s a cheap new piece I could make?” she said. “Cinder blocks? No. I-beams? No. I’ve been walking around thinking about a piece I could buy at a lumberyard or a hardware store. Like railroad ties. But I can’t think of one other thing. Glass? No. Sheet metal? No. I did a sheet-metal dance once, and it didn’t really work.”

She was trying air rams, pneumatic devices used in movies to throw people from an explosion. The air rams are small, square platforms, with an “X” in the center. When you step on the “X,” you get thrown. How far depends on the amount of pressure the machine is set to exert. “My original idea was to fly the dancers across the stage,” she said. “Then, halfway, they would burst into flames, and on the other side someone would put the flames out.”

The machines were set at a relatively low fifteen pounds per square inch. The dancers travelled about six or eight feet in the air, as if they had bounced off a diving board. Most of them, though, stood against a wall. “You see how they’re lurking,” Streb said. The dancers really don’t like air rams. “Every time I go toward it, I have to go to that Zen breathing place,” Cassandre Joseph said. “Everything else we do, we control the force of it. Air rams have their own mind.” Streb asked Matt McAdon, the company’s technical director, if he could raise the pressure to twenty. “If I was able to put it where I wanted, they’d be gone,” she said. Several dancers launched themselves halfheartedly. “You can’t force people to do things,” Streb said. “They’re basically scared of this machine. Too bad I can’t just run and jump and say, ‘Do this.’ ”

After a few more minutes, Streb said, “How about one more, Leonardo. Then we close down and go on.” Giron flew off the platform, leaned back, and turned a languorous somersault backward in the air. Streb flinched, then said, “Wow. Doing a backflip while you’re travelling is so anti-intuitive.” Then she said, “O.K., thank you, everyone, we got our feet wet.” McAdon began dismantling the air rams.

Streb was excited about Giron’s backflip. Each time a dancer performs a move that Streb hasn’t seen, he or she adds to STREB’s vocabulary. “That kind of invention is crucial,” she said. “My dream, what I hope for most of all, is that this inquiry of mine is a transferable methodology. If it’s accurate in terms of time, space, forces, and body, and an astute mind could take that frame into the future, then it will have a bigger life than just me.”

“I think maybe the future of dance is not a single person bossing people around until he or she dies,” she said. “Maybe it’s the generation of an inquiry, based on a system, a methodology that gets established somehow, maybe through a single person’s provocation. Something more like an oral history than the work of a single author. I didn’t really invent this format, because physics exists. I just combined the conditions I was obsessed with, like hardware and action, and then spent thirty years fiddling with them. Who knows where it could go if I get out of the way.”

“What would you do then?”

She took a moment to respond. “I could do a walkabout somewhere in Africa or Asia,” she said. “Wave my flag and walk off into the desert.” ♦

Alec Wilkinson, a regular contributor, is the author of ten books, including “The Protest Singer” and “The Ice Balloon.”